DragonFly versioning plan

[Francois Tigeot]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 08:12:32AM +0200, John Marino wrote:
> On 9/16/2011 3:49 AM, Justin Sherrill wrote:
> >Here's a summation of the thread, just cause it got long, cause some
> >of my original ideas have changed based on feedback, and the results
> >affect everyone:
> >...
> >Any other feedback?  Francois, you had the longer list of objections;
> >does this feel more like it's on the right track?
> While it's nice that this proposal got summarized, the main question
> I have is:
> What's broken about the current system?
> 
> I just have the expression "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." going
> through my head.

John has made a good summary of my feelings.

> I think having a 6-month interval between releases is probably
> optimal.  OpenIndiana just had a release exactly one year after the
> previous one, and thus OI felt quite stale over the last months.  So
> I think one year between releases is too long.

Having to validate hardware for various operating systems, I painfully
know one year or more between releases is too long.
These days, hardware evolution moves so fast that long delays between
releases start to bite you. Debian is especially painful for that.

Even though there are few developers, DragonFly is one of the operating
systems I use which is among the less picky wrt hardware support.
I believe this is caused in no small part by the release schedule.

I tried the last iso of OpenIndiana on a few different types of machines
and it doesn't even boot on new Xeons or Opterons systems; not having an
up-to-date release is killing them IMHO.

I'd hate for DragonFly to make the same mistake and become irrelevant.

> I have the feeling this is much more about limitations of the pkgsrc
> design then about the existing release philosophy.  If so, I'd
> suggest altering the pkgsrc system in the vein that you'd already
> suggested.  It would be nice for me to have a clear summary of what
> problem this proposal is trying to address.  Maybe we come up with
> an alternative solution that doesn't require a change in the release
> schedule.

This is also my position.

Do not transform a pkgsrc problem into a DragonFly one.

-- 
Francois Tigeot